tively soft: the scratches had sliced through the paint without splintering it. There appeared to be seventeen such scratches, made by a sharp blade, through the eyes, the nose, and the mouth, as if someone-possibly a Catholic parti- san-had tried to obliterate the face. Also compelling to Foley was the fact that the girl in the picture matched Spi- nolà s description ofJ ane. In April, Foley wrote up the findings, which confirmed his initial impressions, and sent a copy of them to Sir John Guin- ness, who suggested that he also send a copy to David Starkey. Starkey wrote to Foley that though he found the case in- teresting, he remained skeptical. I n November, the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery voted to buy the Streatham portrait, for ninety- five thousand pounds. Foley brokered the deal. (In the current art market, it wasn't much: last year the Gallery raised 1.4 million pounds to purchase a con- temporary portrait of John Donne.) There was one immediate objection- from Starkey. While earlier in the year he'd been noncommittal about the Streatham portrait, he now told the Guardian that not only was it an "ap- pallingly bad picture," but "there's ab- solutely no reason to suppose it's got anything to do with Lady Jane Grey. If the National Portrait Gallery has pub- lic money to burn, then so be it." He added, "There's no documentary evi- dence, no evidence from inventories, jewellery, or heraldry to support the idea this is Lady Jane Grey." Foley responded in the Guardian that perhaps Starkey was annoyed that he hadn't found the picture himself. Many people, Foley remarked, "know more about the science of painting than David Starkey." As for the quality of the picture, he noted, 'Who said all pictures of monarchs have to be masterpieces? Many contemporary portraits of Eliza- beth I look like pub signs." All the evi- dence needed, he said, was intrinsic to the painting itselE A few months earlier, it turned out, while researching the "Lost Faces" show for the Philip Mould Gallery, Starkey had made a discovery of his own. Ben- dor Grosvenor, a director at the gallery, told me, "David rang me up. He was breathless. He said, 'I've found Lady 50 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 15, 2007 Jane Grey!' She was the Rosetta stone. I made, let's say, a graphic exclamation of shock and excitement." Starkey told Grosvenor that he had found a photograph of a miniature in a catalogue from a 1983 show at the Vic- toria and Albert Museum, "Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Minia- ture Rediscovered." He hadn't seen the actual painting, but he was sure it was a contemporary portrait of Jane. Grosve- nor found the catalogue in the gallery's library. The show had been curated by Sir Roy Strong, who was then the direc- tor of the V. & A. The miniature was in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven. Describ- ing the photograph, Grosvenor made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and brought it to his eye as if looking through a monocle. He laughed. "It was that small," he said. The round miniature, which is less than two inches in diameter, is of a young, full-faced woman with light- brown hair and blue eyes-Strong called her a "fully developed, tough teenager" -dressed in a severe black square-necked gown. Oak leaves, acorns, and what look like tiny yel- low flowers, which Strong identified as cowslips, are tucked into her brooch, which features a black classical head set in gold. The arms are abnormally small, even spindly. A faint inscrip- tion reads "ANO XVIII." The back- ground is lapis blue. Strong suggested that the sitter might be Elizabeth I, and tentatively attributed the miniature to Levina Teerlinc, a Flemish painter at- tached to the Tudor court. The identity of the sitter has long been questioned. The miniature was auctioned as one of a pair, of a hus- band and wife, at Sotheby's London in 1970. (Both portraits were then attrib- uted to the court painter Lucas Horen- bout; Strong disagreed that the sitters were a couple, and attributed the male portrait to Hans Holbein.) The min- iatures were subsequently bought by Paul Mellon, and in 1974 he donated them to Yale. In August, Philip Mould wrote to Amy Meyers, the director of the Yale Center for British Art, to request a loan of the female portrait miniature for "Lost Faces." Meyers told me, 'We thought it was an interesting thesis. But we were in no way endorsing Da- vid's opinion." As a historian, Starkey has been par- ticularly interested in young monarchs- his book "Elizabeth I" focusses on that queen's early years. Last June, he told me, "I'm interested in lives. One of the elements of biography is portraiture- however much phrenology is a pseudo- science, we tend to need faces. The chal- lenge became to find an image of Jane Grey. I literally began trawling." He added, "I was looking at Roy Strong's book, and I thought, Eureka! I'm ninety " per cent sure. When I asked him about the Streatham portrait, he told me, 'What I've said is that it doesn't matter, because it's such a bad picture. Why have such a portrait? For the National Portrait Gal- lery, it's a trophy. It turns curatorship into philately. It's a late, scruffy, unrec- ognizable portrait of something or other. It doesn't matter if the attribution . " IS correct. T he Streatham portrait was not the first picture of Jane Grey to show up in the National Portrait Gallery. The archives are full of copies of spuri- ous images, and a full-length portrait identified as Jane hung in the Gallery for thirty years, until 1996, when the red-haired sitter, who also resembled the Spinola description, was re-identi- fied as Catherine Parr, after the neck- lace in the painting was found in the list of her jewels in the Tudor inventory. (The question remains, though, of whether Catherine could have lentJane the jewels.) The Streatham portrait was hung in the Tudor Gallery. One morning last June, it was filled with schoolchildren gaping at the kings and queens. In the gallery's low light, the red and gold of the portrait looks bleached; the slight figure has the flat face of a paper doll. Tarnya Cooper, the Gallery's curator of Tudor paintings, told me, "We now think this picture may have been one of a set of Protestant martyrs, a me- morial picture painted shortly after her death." She added, "We're the first to admit it's a paint-by-number, labored copy. David Starkey is a colorful char- acter, and his reaction to this is, let's say, colorful." She smiled, and said, "I don't know if he's come to see this, and